Bite Marks #121

In which I do another round-up of casual visits to various spots around town, and update my Recoleta café dive.

What do we have in this round of the game? As regular readers know, my going out has been a little bit curtailed over the last month or so due to first a pulled calf muscle and then a couple of week bout with vertigo. But somewhere in there I managed a Japanese lunchbox and a visit to what’s touted as the best milanesa place in the city, or at least a branch of it. My coffee intake continues as always, and while I’ve narrowed down to some favorites here in the ‘hood, I still try to pick up a few of the remaining ones that I haven’t tried, plus new ones open up regularly - it’s the new hot trend.

A takeout order from Arrozales by Base, another of the new offerings in the gourmet food hall in Alto Palermo shopping center. It got a bit smooshed, particularly the onigiri there in the upper right which was outside of the bento box, but worked it’s way underneath in the bag. The flavors were all there. It was a tasty onigiri packed with miso glazed pork, the tonkatsu, pork milanesa, was crispy outside and juicy inside, and while the sauce was a little sweeter than I’d usually want, it wasn’t excessive. Mixed sauteed veg, a decent harumaki (spring roll), and rice completed the lunch set. The bento box a very good deal at 18800 pesos, and the onigiri not out of line at 4600 ($14 and $3.50, respectively).

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So, where is the best milanesa in the city? It’s a question that comes up regularly among folk who like to eat out here. And there are so many factors that go into answering a question like that. For some it’s the steak itself, for others the crust, and for still others, the toppings available. A few years back, in part of their now long defunct series of “best of barrio” polls, major newspaper Clarin asked readers to vote on the best milanesas in their ‘hoods. The overall top winner went resoundingly to the Villa del Parque branch (I think the original) of El Antojo, one of four outlets for this mini-chain. Somehow, I’d never made it to any one of them, but that has been remedied with a visit to their Nuñez locale at Manuel Ugarte 1699.

Typical modern-ish bodegón, relatively busy, and it kept getting busier. Clearly quite popular. The menu offers a range of about two dozen different milanesas, everything available in either regular or XL size, and in beef or chicken. Our waitress felt that we could “probably” split a regular size if we weren’t overly hungry.

Yeah, I think we can probably split that. The regular is a solid 10” across, at the least. Their De la Casa, house special, is topped with several slices of ham, a mound of bubbly mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, rashers of bacon, and a choice of side dish - we went with an arugula and parmesan salad that was as big as the milanesa. Several times a waitperson carried an extra large past our table - it was well over double the size of this, possibly three times as large.

It’s a very good milanesa. I don’t know the milanesas of Villa del Parque, but this wouldn’t be a bad entry for best in the neighborhood, though one might hope for more. Given that there are three other branches, in other neighborhoods, and the El Antojos in those ‘hoods didn’t make the list versus other spots, I’d say Villa del Parque needs to up its game. Still, I’d happily eat this again, I just wouldn’t go out of my way to go there. 35000 pesos, just under $27, and easily feeding two.

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Alright, let’s talk cafés again. This little obsession started back in April of last year, when I’d read a Business Insider article claiming that one’s happiness could be directly related to the number of good cafés in your immediate walking radius. At least that was the clickbait headline. Now, at the time, I took a couple of hours one afternoon and went up and down every street in what I considered my comfort zone for “close to home”, which was basically a sort of average of within a five minute or so walk of the house.

The map at the time filled out to 47 cafés and 2 tea shops, basically bounded by the avenues Pueyrredón, Santa Fé, and Callao, and the area around the Recoleta Cemetery on the fourth side.

Now, this is the map today. First, I altered the colors a bit - the lighter colored ones are the ones I haven’t yet sampled, the dark ones, I have, and have put a mini-review up on an active, personalized Google Map, which is slowly filling in. Assuming my counting abilities have not diminished over the last sixteen months, there are now 63 cafés and 2 tea shops in basically the same area. Of that 16 café increase, I think four are simply where I went slightly outside of my previous boundaries - extending another block alongside the cemetery, plus one off to the other side of Pueyrredón, and adding one on the south side across the street on Santa Fé. Two of the previous cafés included in the original map have closed, but both were swiftly replaced by new ones. That’s a lot of new coffee places close to home.

Here are a trio of the most recent samplings.

Now, Honorio, Av. Pueyrredón 1501, was on the original map, and has been around far longer than I’ve been here. It’s an old school café with a limited additional menu for lunch and dinner of sandwiches, milanesas, and pastas. Service is friendly, attentive, and prompt. It’s a very comfortable space, and I settled in with a book for about an hour. The coffee is decent, if not great. It’s one of the few cafés at which I’ve seen real muffins offered. Good vanilla muffin with a little dulce de leche center - maybe slightly denser than a great muffin would be, but I didn’t leave any crumbs. There are certainly better places to get coffee around here, but I kind of like the laid back feel of it.

At the complete opposite end of the timeline is the brand new (less than a month old) República, Av. Gral. Las Heras 2061, taking over the space vacated not long ago by the execrable pizza and empanada shop, Mula. Good riddance to them, and welcome to the new folk. The coffee is freshly ground and roasted, it’s quite good. The pastries are a little hit and miss - we’ve been a couple of times. Very good chipas, decent scones, terrible cookies (texture wrong and way, way too much sugar, which is probably why the texture is all wrong), and a pretty good pasta frola (a short-crust based tart topped with quince paste and a pastry lattice). They’re stil settling in, and the offerings vary. They do also have focaccia sandwiches, though looking at them, I’m not sure they make them themselves, they may be being made at a local bakery. That could be true of the other baked goods - I don’t really see a kitchen in the place big enough for the production of what they’re offering.

About a year ago a small patisserie opened up at Av. Pueyrredón 1753, Nuña & Co., offering an array of medialunas, though honestly these are more full-on croissants, that are filled, glazed, and dusted. At any given time they have around a dozen different flavors on offer, and they change up regularly. At some point they started offering coffee service as well. There’s not really a seating area, there’s a small counter in a corner in the display window with room for three on barstools. But it’s worth stopping in just for the croissants, which are ridiculously good. The coffee is Nescafe pods - good but not great. They also have a second location downtown near Plaza San Martín and third up in Olivos.

On to other things! Now that I’m back out in the world, there’s fun stuff to come.